Recently, more and more people use the Internet. The servers that can be accessed to from the terminals connected to the Internet have increased to a great number. Various kinds of information are recorded in each server at the discretion of the manager of the server. The operator of any terminal can be access to the server to obtain the information he or she needs. In general, the operator inputs a row of characters, called “URL,” in order to access the information available on the Internet.
As is known, there is the trend that the terminal operator usually wants to access particular information stored in the server. To access the information by doing an operation as little as possible, the operator may use a function known as “bookmark.” The bookmark function enables the operator to have access to the information when he or she selects a row of characters or an icon that designates the information. By performing this function, the terminal operator can access the information more quickly than in the case where he or she designates the information by inputting an URL or the like, which is longer row of characters.
The technique mentioned above is implemented in household electric devices, as well as so-called personal computers. Particularly, information terminals called “digital televisions” can not only receive broadcast information, but also have access to specified information because they are connected to the network.
In the function of bookmark, however, one row of characters represents no more than the location of the information. The process performed by the use of the bookmark is limited to an access to the location where the information exists. The bookmark cannot initiate any other operations. A person may put bookmarks to the network addresses of many other people (audience) in order to give information to them via the network. In this case, the audience cannot manage the book-marked addresses.
When a person applies an entry for a prize contest or a lottery through the Internet in the conventional information systems, the response to the application reaches him or her in the form of character data, though the character data may includes an image in some cases. To receive the prize or get a ticket reserved, for example, that person needs to read the character data carefully and perform some operation that is usually wearisome.
In the conventional information retrieve systems, even if the person who has applied an entry for a prize contest or a lottery receives a response in the form of image data, he or she must scroll the terminal screen or have access to other sites in order to retrieve the detailed information about the image data. Usually, he or she needs to spend for a long time to retrieve the information and can hardly understand the information at a glance.